U.S. ARMY INTELLIGENCE SECTION (MIS) REPORT Dated: May 12, 1946
Title: Report on the Rice Bowl Hill Incident, 1944
Document Number: PTYX-722-8936745-42216-WWN
The following is a taped interview with Doctor Juichi Nakazawa (53), who ran
an internal medicine clinic in [name deleted] Town at the time of the incident.
Materials related to the interview can be accessed using application number
PTYX-722-SQ-162 to 183.
Impressions of the interviewer Lt. Robert O'Connor: Doctor Nakazawa is so big
boned and dark skinned he looks more like a farm foreman than a doctor. He has
a calm manner but is very brisk and concise and says exactly what's on his mind.
Behind his glasses his eyes have a very sharp, alert look, and his memory seems
reliable.
That's correct—at eleven a.m. on November 7, 1944, I received a phone call
from the assistant principal at the local elementary school. I used to be the
school doctor, or something close to it, so that's why they contacted me first.
The assistant principal was terribly upset. He told me that an entire class had lost
consciousness while on an outing in the hills to pick mushrooms. According to
him they were totally unconscious. Only the teacher in charge had remained
conscious, and she'd run back to school for help just then. She was so flustered I
couldn't grasp the whole situation, though one fact did come through loud and
clear: sixteen children had collapsed in the woods.
The kids were out picking mushrooms, so of course my first thought was that
they'd eaten some poisonous ones and been paralyzed. If that were the case it'd
be difficult to treat. Different varieties of mushrooms have different toxicity
levels, and the treatments vary. The most we could do at the moment would be to
pump out their stomachs. In the case of highly toxic varieties, though, the poison
might enter the bloodstream quickly and we might be too late. Around here,
several people a year die from poison mushrooms.
I stuffed some emergency medicine in my bag and rode my bike over to the
school as fast as I could. The police had been contacted and two policemen were
already there. We knew we had to get the unconscious kids back to town and
would need all the help we could get. Most of the young men were away at war,
though, so we set off with the best we had—myself, the two policemen, an
elderly male teacher, the assistant principal and principal, the school janitor. And
of course the homeroom teacher who'd been with the kids. We grabbed whatever
bicycles we could find, but there weren't enough, so some of us rode two to a
bike.
—What time did you arrive at the site?
It was 11:55. I remember since I happened to glance at my watch when we got
there. We rode our bicycles to the bottom of the hill, as far as we could go, then
climbed the rest of the way on foot.
By the time I arrived several children had partially regained consciousness.
Three or four of them, as I recall. But they weren't fully conscious—sort of
dizzily on all fours.
The rest of the children were still collapsed. After a while some of the others
began to come around, their bodies undulating like so many big worms. It was a
very strange sight. The children had collapsed in an odd, flat, open space in the
woods where it looked like all the trees had been neatly removed, with autumn
sunlight shining down brightly. And here you had, in this spot or at the edges of
it, sixteen elementary-school kids scattered about prostrate on the ground, some
of them starting to move, some of them completely still. The whole thing
reminded me of some weird avant-garde play.
For a moment I forgot that I was supposed to treat the kids and just stood there,
frozen, staring at the scene. Not just myself—everyone in the rescue group
reacted the same, paralyzed for a while by what they saw. This might be a
strange way of putting it, perhaps, but it was like some mistake had occurred that
allowed us to see a sight people should never see. It was wartime, and I was
always mentally prepared, as a physician, to deal with whatever came, in the
remote possibility that something awful would occur way out here in the country.
Prepared as a citizen of Japan to calmly do my duty if the need arose. But when I
saw this scene in the woods I literally froze.
I soon snapped out of it, and picked up one of the children, a little girl. Her body
had no strength in it at all and was limp as a rag doll. Her breathing was steady
but she was still unconscious. Her eyes, though, were open, tracking something
back and forth. I pulled a small flashlight out of my bag and shined it on her
pupils. Completely unreactive. Her eyes were functioning, watching something,
yet showed no response to light. I picked up several other children and examined
them and they were all exactly the same, unresponsive. I found this quite odd.
I next checked their pulse and temperature. Their pulses were between 50 and
55, and all of them had temperatures just below 97 degrees. Somewhere around
96 degrees or thereabouts, as I recall. That's correct—for children of that age this
pulse rate is well below normal, the body temperature over one degree below
average. I smelled their breath, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
Likewise with their throats and tongues.
I immediately ascertained these weren't the symptoms of food poisoning.
Nobody had vomited or suffered diarrhea, and none of them seemed to be in any
pain. If the children had eaten something bad you could expect—with this much
time having elapsed—the onset of at least one of these symptoms. I heaved a
sigh of relief that it wasn't food poisoning. But then I was stumped, since I hadn't
a clue what was wrong with them.
The symptoms were similar to sunstroke. Kids often collapse from this in the
summer. It's like it's contagious—once one of them collapses their friends all do
the same, one after the other. But this was November, in a cool woods, no less.
One or two getting sunstroke is one thing, but sixteen children simultaneously
coming down with it was out of the question.
My next thought was some kind of poison gas or nerve gas, either naturally
occurring or manmade. But how in the world could gas appear in the middle of
the woods in such a remote part of the country? I couldn't account for it. Poison
gas, though, would logically explain what I saw that day. Everyone breathed it
in, went unconscious, and collapsed on the spot. The homeroom teacher didn't
collapse because the concentration of gas wasn't strong enough to affect an adult.
But when it came to treating the children, I was totally lost. I'm just a simple
country doctor and have no special expertise in poison gasses, so I was out of my
league.
We were out in this remote town and I couldn't very well ring up a specialist.
Very gradually, in fact, some of the children were getting better, and I figured
that perhaps with time they would all regain consciousness. I know it's an overly
optimistic view, but at the time I couldn't think of anything else to do. So I
suggested that we just let them lie there quietly for a while and see what
developed.
—Was there anything unusual in the air?
I was concerned about that myself, so I took several deep breaths to see if I
could detect any unusual odor. But it was just the ordinary smell of a woods in
the hills. It was a bracing scent, the fragrance of trees. Nothing unusual about the
plants and flowers around there, either. Nothing had changed shape or been
discolored.
One by one I examined the mushrooms the children had been picking. There
weren't all that many, which led me to conclude that they'd collapsed not long
after they began picking them. All of them were typical edible mushrooms. I've
been a doctor here for some time and am quite familiar with the different
varieties. Of course to be on the safe side I collected them all and took them
back and had a specialist examine them. But as far as I could tell, they were all
ordinary, edible mushrooms.
—You said the unconscious children's eyes moved back and forth, but did you
notice any other unusual symptoms or reactions? For instance, the size of their
pupils, the color of the whites of their eyes, the frequency of their blinking?
No. Other than their eyes moving back and forth like a searchlight, there was
nothing out of the ordinary. All other functions were completely normal. The
children were looking at something. To put a finer point on it, the children
weren't looking at what we could see, but something we couldn't. It was more
like they were observing something rather than just looking at it. They were
essentially expressionless, but overall they seemed calm, not afraid or in any
pain. That's also one of the reasons I decided to just let them lie there and see
how things played out. I decided if they're not in any pain, then just let them be
for a while.
—Did anyone mention the idea that the children had been gassed?
Yes, they did. But like me they couldn't figure out how it was possible. I mean,
no one had ever heard of somebody going on a hike in the woods and ending up
getting gassed. Then one of the people there—the assistant principal, I believe it
was—said it might have been gas dropped by the Americans. They must have
dropped a bomb with poison gas, he said. The homeroom teacher recalled seeing
what looked like a B-29 in the sky just before they started up the hill, flying right
overhead. That's it! everyone said, some new poison gas bomb the Americans
developed. Rumors about the Americans developing a new kind of bomb had
even reached our neck of the woods. But why would the Americans drop their
newest weapon in such an out-of-the-way place? That we couldn't explain. But
mistakes are part of life, and some things we aren't meant to understand, I
suppose.
—After this, then, the children gradually recovered on their own?
They did. I can't tell you how relieved I was. At first they started squirming
around, then they sat up unsteadily, gradually regaining consciousness. No one
complained of any pain during this process. It was all very quiet, like they were
waking up from a deep sleep. And as they regained consciousness their eye
movements became normal again. They showed normal reactions to light when I
shined a flashlight in their eyes. It took some time, though, for them to be able to
speak again—just like you are when you first wake up.
We asked each of the children what had happened, but they looked
dumbfounded, like we were asking about something they didn't remember taking
place. Going up the hill, starting to gather mushrooms—that much they recalled.
Everything after that was a total blank. They had no sense of any time passing
between then and now. They start gathering mushrooms, then the curtain falls,
and here they are lying on the ground, surrounded by all these adults. The
children couldn't figure out why we were all upset, staring at them with these
worried looks on our faces. They seemed more afraid of us than anything else.
Sadly, there was one child, a boy, who didn't regain consciousness. One of the
children evacuated from Tokyo. Satoru Nakata, I believe his name was. A small,
pale little boy. He was the only one who remained unconscious. He just lay there
on the ground, his eyes moving back and forth. We had to carry him back down
the hill. The other children walked back down like nothing had happened.
—Other than this boy, Nakata, none of the other children showed any symptoms
later on?
As far as any outward signs at least, no, they displayed no unusual symptoms.
No one complained of pain or discomfort. As soon as we got back to the school I
brought the children into the nurse's room one by one and examined them—took
their temperature, listened to their heart with a stethoscope, checked their vision.
Whatever I was able to do at the time I did. I had them solve some simple
arithmetic problems, stand on one foot with their eyes closed, things like that.
Physically they were fine. They didn't seem tired and had healthy appetites.
They'd missed lunch so they all said they were hungry. We gave them rice balls
to eat, and they gobbled them up.
A few days later I stopped by the school to observe how the children were doing.
I called a few of them into the nurse's room and questioned them. Again, though,
everything seemed fine. No traces remained, physically or emotionally, from
their strange experience. They couldn't even remember that it had happened.
Their lives were completely back to normal, unaffected by the incident. They
attended class as usual, sang songs, played outside during recess, everything
normal kids did. Their homeroom teacher, however, was a different story: she
still seemed in shock.
But that one boy, Nakata, didn't regain consciousness, so the following day he
was taken to the university hospital in Kofu. After that he was transferred to a
military hospital, and never came back to our town again. I never heard what
became of him.
This incident never made the newspapers. My guess is the authorities decided it
would only cause unrest, so they banned any mention of it. You have to
remember that during the war the military tried to squelch whatever they saw as
groundless rumors.
The war wasn't going well, with the military retreating on the southern front,
suicide attacks one after the other, air raids on cities getting worse all the time.
The military was especially afraid of any antiwar or pacifist sentiment cropping
up among the populace.
A few days after the incident the police came calling and warned us that under
no circumstances were we to talk about what we'd seen.
The whole thing was an odd, unpleasant affair. Even to this day it's like a weight
pressing down on me